Stan Pesick and Shelley Weintraub | DeTocqueville's Ghost: Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America | The History Teacher, 36.2

DeTocqueville's Ghost: Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America

Stan Pesick and Shelley Weintraub
Oakland Unified School District, California

THE NEED TO INCREASE the content knowledge of American History teachers is emphasized by the Teaching American History Grant. This focus recognizes the crucial role played by classroom teachers in helping students increase their knowledge and understanding of Ameri-can History. Oakland Unified School District's Teaching American History project, "DeTocqueville's Ghost: Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America," is working to meet the challenge, and take advantage of the opportunity presented by this grant. Through this work we are trying to answer the fundamental question, "How can increased and enhanced historical knowledge gained by teachers find its way into their lessons and thus increase student knowledge and understanding of Ameri-can History?" This article highlights how we have sought to answer this question during our first year. It notes the issues and questions raised as a result of that work, and outlines our plans for grappling with these issues and questions during the remaining two years of the project.

The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in Oakland, California, is a large urban district whose students, on the whole, have not performed well on state and national assessments of basic skills, or on assessments of knowledge of American History. A few statistics show the problems we face.¹

Only one-third of OUSD graduates are eligible for the University of California or the California State University systems upon graduation.
In the spring of 2000, Oakland Unified administered the Golden State Exam in United States History to only 401 of its 1,800 11^th graders. Of these 401 students only 130 received a passing score and, only 15, less than 1% of the district's 11^th graders, received high honors.
Only 118 students—less than six percent of the 11^th graders in the district—chose to take the AP exam in United States History. Two-thirds of these students did not receive a passing score. In two of our high schools, no students chose to take this exam.
In the 5^th grade only 39% of student's score at or above the 50^th percentile in reading on the Stanford 9 examination, while at the 8^th grade this number decreases to 36%.
Two thirds of our 8^th graders attend a school with an API score of 1, the lowest possible score on California's Academic Performance Indicator.

As an additional challenge, our district has a difficult time recruiting and keeping credentialed teachers. For example, thirty percent of the district's fifth-grade teachers were not yet fully credentialed in 2001. Even among credentialed teachers academic preparation in history is often deficient. Eighth-grade American History is taught as part of an English/history core. Of the sixty eighth-grade core teachers in the district, only one third had a History/Social Studies credential. Fifth-grade teachers may or may not have majored in history—their credentials do not require this information. Demographically, our district's students are diverse: forty-nine percent African American, twenty-five percent Latin American, nineteen percent Asian/Pacific Islander, six percent white. Over one third of Oakland's students are English language learners and while the largest number of these are Spanish speaking, fifty one different languages are spoken by the students in our district.

A Background to Build On

The "DeTocqueville's Ghost" project builds on two previous district initiatives to improve history instruction in our classrooms. The first, begun in 1997 and completed in 1999, was to develop and adopt district-wide "Historical Thinking" standards. Using the state of California's Framework as a guide for the topics to be covered, a district Standards Committee, whose members included twenty K-12 history teachers, developed a document that focused on how to help students develop and demonstrate historical understanding. With historical understanding as the goal, our district standards focus on historical thinking as an essential component to helping students learn history. Our standards identify five categories of historical thinking

Chronological and Spatial
Examining Evidence
Diversity/Multiple Perspectives
Interpretation
Determining Historical/Geographical Significance

The standards document discusses how these categories connect to the discipline of history and provides examples of lessons and units that offer models for integrating historical thinking skills into content-based instruction. Our standards take a developmental view of how students' historical thinking becomes more sophisticated as they move from primary grades, to elementary school, to middle school, and, finally, on to high school.² As an example of this developmental approach, consider what students should be able to do as they work with evidence. In fourth and fifth-grades, our standards suggest that students should, among a number of other skills, be able to use sources to generate questions about the past. They should understand that primary sources can tell us about the person or people who created them. By the end of middle school students should also be able to use a source to ascertain the purposes and perspectives of the author. In addition, they should be able to begin to relate two or more primary sources from the same time period. By high school, students should be able to explain how the beliefs and values embedded in a document are related to the time during which the source was produced.

Our second initiative was to use the thinking standards to evaluate textbooks when the state went through its history-social studies adoption in 1999-2000. We evaluated the texts on how well they supported our focus on historical thinking and on what they demanded from students in terms of historical understanding. Fundamentally, we tried to persuade teachers that no textbook, no matter how good, could be the entire curriculum, solely determining both course content and how it is taught. We knew from experience that textbooks, by themselves, would not support the kind of history instruction and learning envisioned in our standards. In a subject which has been as wedded to the textbook as K-12 history, implementing this vision meant a need to understand the history of history instruction and a need to understand what kinds of professional development might help teachers translate this vision into day-to-day classroom instruction and increased student learning.

We have a large district, over 3,000 teachers. While only twenty were part of the standards committee, 250 went through the process of choosing history textbooks. The work done by these individuals gave us a core of teachers who were thinking differently about history education. The development of district historical thinking standards and the textbook adoption process planted seeds that were ready to grow. As we did this work it became apparent that many teachers themselves recognized the acute need for professional development opportunities. One fifth-grade teacher who was later to participate in the project wrote, "I am constantly struggling with ways to make history relevant and interesting to my students. Acquiring a deeper understanding of American History would certainly help my quest." Because this view was widely held and because of our background work on standards and textbooks, we believed we were in position to make productive use of a grant from the Department of Education.

The Project

To try and begin to meet the vast needs of both students and teachers in our district we recognized the need both to enhance the historical knowledge and skills of teachers and students and to find ways to bring American History to life so that students are engaged in studies meaningful to them and their experiences. More specifically, for teachers we needed to address the gaps in teacher training identified above through deepening teachers' content knowledge and identifying connections between reading, writing, and the study of history. For students, we needed to teach the academic skills necessary for success in the study of Ameri-can History: reading of expository texts, writing, and analytical reasoning. That these skills are also necessary for our students' future academic success in whatever field they choose is an important factor in the work of our project.

To recruit teachers for the project, we sent a letter of invitation to all 5^th grade teachers in the district, as well as to all 8^th and 11^th grade American History teachers. In addition, at the urging of UC Berkeley librarian Lynn Jones, director of the California Heritage Project, we also invited school librarians to join the project. The invitation asked teachers to write a brief statement explaining why they wanted to participate in this project. Our goal was to recruit ten teachers from each grade level—5^th 8^th, and 11^th. We received about thirty-five applications, and accepted thirty teachers and two school librarians.

The project aims to integrate three areas of professional growth for our teachers into a coherent professional development program. These are: 1) Developing historical understanding by increasing content knowledge and integrating this content knowledge with historical thinking; 2) Integrating reading, writing, and history, and 3) Increasing collaboration and articulation among history teachers at the 5^th, 8^th, and 11th grade levels.

Developing Historical Understanding

Increasing Content Knowledge. Our district is in complete agreement with the Department of Education's emphasis on the importance of content. Staff development programs that engage teachers in recent scholarship in the academic discipline and the content they teach is not only critically important, but all too rare. A focus on content asks teachers to think deeply about the subject they teach. It asks them to reconsider how to approach differently a topic they may have taught for years, and to think about what's important in a topic they may have never taught.³

To help build the instructional roads that might lead towards the development of historical understanding, we chose to organize the work of the project around a specific historical theme: the struggle for democracy in America. To help achieve this goal, we arranged a partnership with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) History-Social Science Project. This project, directed by Donna Leary, is our link to UCB's Department of History, and provides the opportunity to draw upon the expertise of the department's many nationally recognized scholars. Last year the thirty teachers we recruited as part of our first cohort heard a speaker at each of our monthly after-school sessions, and a speaker at each day of our five-day summer institute. The speakers, almost all UC Berkeley historians, and their topics were:

Robin Einhorn—"Founding Documents"
Jon Gjerde—"American Democracy, Citizenship, and Belonging"
Waldo Martin (two presentations)—"Teaching Frederick Douglass," and "The Confessions of Nat Turner: Origins and Legacies."
Leon Litwack (two presentations)—"The Aftermath of Slavery," and " The African American Experience in WWII."
Charles Postel—"Labor History & the Struggle for Democracy"
Diane Clemens—"America's Mission Abroad: City on a Hill and Open Door"
Marcia Eymann (Curator of Historical Photography, Oakland Museum of California)—"California & Viet Nam—Doing Difficult History"

Our other partner, Lynn Jones, director of the previously mentioned Califor-nia Heritage Project, provides participating teachers with information about how to access a wide range of primary and secondary source documents and with training in how best to use these sources with the students in their classrooms. To help engage teachers in this discussion we devoted one session to a presentation by Ms. Jones on "Psyching Out Sources: Historical Thinking Skills and Information Skepticism."

The content of our work with historians, teachers, and, ultimately, the students in the classrooms of those same teachers focuses on the following questions:

How has democracy evolved throughout American History?
What have been our democratic aspirations and to what degree have they been realized?

Oakland's student population represents groups of people whose history has not always been included in the traditional narratives of the American past. In addition, many of our students are recent immigrants who have limited knowledge of the people and events that shaped our history. We believe that this focus has the potential to engage students in historical inquiry because it asks them to consider how people in the past struggled for liberty, equality, and justice, and it also asks students to evaluate how these struggles continue today. Focusing on the struggle for democracy in America also appealed to the teachers who applied to work with our project, for as one 11^th grade teacher wrote in applying to participate in the program, "DeTocqueville's ghost has been haunting me for some years now."

Integrating Content Knowledge and Historical Thinking. Continuing to address and explore the role historical thinking skills play in the development of historical understanding is also part of the focus on increasing and enhancing content knowledge. To think deeply about particular content, for instance, on the formation and adoption of the Constitution, requires the skill to read primary sources. Such primary sources might include the document itself, as well as contemporary arguments about its adoption. It means examining different perspectives on the Constitution (merchant, farmer, slave, political leader) and considering different interpretations about why this document took the form it did. As historians addressed the project teachers and staff on questions connected to the writing of the Constitution, it became evident to them that history is contentious. Just as historians develop different explanations and arguments over its meaning, its significance, and how best to explain and understand the ideas and motives of its authors, so do teachers need to allow students the same opportunity to struggle with the past as they develop lessons that integrate content and historical thinking.

Integrating Reading, Writing, and History

History is a discipline that, by definition, is rooted in reading and writing and it cannot exist apart from these skills. Teachers, while recognizing this fact, often limit what they ask students to do because these students lack the ability to read and comprehend the assigned texts. In a survey we gave to participants in the grant's first cohort, two thirds said the textbook guided their instruction and over half said it was their main resource. Yet almost eighty-percent of the same teachers reported that students have difficulty reading the textbook. Every teacher stated that it was challenging to help English language learners acquire the language skills they need to understand history. Every teacher agreed with the statement that "teaching students to write coherent and thoughtful essays, papers and accounts is challenging." The gap between the needs of the discipline and the skills of many of our students is glaring and our project views helping teachers bridge the divide as a critical goal. This gap is made even more challenging when we take into account the goal of having students work with historical evidence that was not written, as the textbook is, with them in mind.

Increasing Collaboration and Articulation

Deciding to include 5^th, 8^th, and 11^th grade teachers in our project was a very conscious decision, made to try and promote collaboration and articulation. In California, United States History is taught at the 5^th grade (pre-European contact to 1840), 8^th grade (Constitution-to 1900) and 11^th grade (1900-to the present).⁴ This is a framework of instruction that begs for teachers across grade levels to speak to each other, asking questions such as, "What topics did you teach? What did you emphasize? What did you leave out?" But the conversations, as we view it, need to go even deeper. We are very interested in how over time students develop the ability to think historically. In what ways can an 11^th grader understand the past that would be impossible for a 5^th grader? And what strategies can we use with our 5^th graders that will build towards an ability to think historically? Thus, going over a list of topics teachers cover is important, but of equal importance is a discussion how they've taught students to think. After all, what a 5^th grader can learn about the American Revolution (even if they remember it six years later) is very different from what can be expected of an 11^th grader. One feature of our project design is to provide an empirical basis for understanding this developmental process of historical thinking. Thus, in our context, articulation is a murky, yet potentially rich area of professional growth.

All of the teachers who joined the project agreed with the statement, "The opportunity to collaborate with history colleagues to develop, test and refine classroom lessons is important." New teachers are eager, even desperate, to hear about classroom practices from more experienced teachers. Veteran teachers want to break the cycle—so frequently seen on school sites—of teachers talking only about classroom discipline or how the school's daily schedule is organized. Teachers who applied to participate in this project endorse the collaborative nature of the professional development program, to work both across and within grade levels to improve contact between 5^th, 8^th, and 11^th grade teachers.

Year One: Getting Started, Creating Opportunities and Identifying Challenges

Emphasizing Content: Working With Historians. Participants were delighted to hear from the university historians, but their presentations also provided challenges and raised a number of questions. Teachers heard the historians and thought about what they had to say, but each historian focused on a particular time period or event. This meant that his or her presentation was not directly applicable to all teachers participating in the project, given California's chronological framework of history instruction. Thus, teachers were required to make connections between what they were hearing in the scholarly presentations and the content they taught. For example, Professor Waldo Martin's discussion of Nat Turner's Revolt connected directly to the content of the eighth-grade course, but was outside the content mandate for the 5^th and 11^th grade teachers. Fifth grade teachers needed to consider what Nat Turner's Revolt meant for how they discussed the institution of slavery with their students, while eleventh grade teachers needed to consider Turner's legacy beyond the institution of slavery and how his revolt might be significant to 20^th century struggles for racial and social justice. This challenge was the same whether the topic was 18^th century immigration policy, late 19^th century labor relations, or 20^th century foreign policy. In addition, because we also sought ways to have the presentations support our goal of implementing the district historical thinking standards, we had to illustrate and model how the content of history includes both the specific individuals and events and the thinking processes at the core of historical inquiry and historical understanding.

To help provide content presentations that might be useful to all participants as well as to integrate considerations of historical thinking into classroom practice, we asked each historian to focus his or her presentation around a discussion of key primary source documents. We asked them to address the same two questions we asked teachers, "What are your students' conceptions of democracy and American History?" and "What do you want your students to learn about the history of democracy in America?" While it was hit or miss in terms of how directly these questions were answered by the university historians, each scholar did focus our attention on key documents and how they themselves used them with their students.⁵ By directly addressing how they chose and worked with primary source documents as they constructed an historical account, the historians demonstrated that the content of historical inquiry includes both the significant events and individuals at the center of an investigation and a specific set of approaches that can help students gain understanding of the period or person they are studying. This approach is embedded in the Oakland Unified School District's Historical Thinking Standards.

With these considerations in mind we sought, in collaboration with our university partners and the historians, to fine-tune the presentations so they supported as closely as possible what we hoped teachers might take to their classrooms. But it is one thing to invite teachers to leave their classrooms periodically to participate in a project like this, and another thing to implement this work in classrooms. We were thus confronted with a difficult issue. The content presentations are essential in terms of the project's goals of increasing and enhancing content knowledge and focusing on historical thinking, but at the same time, they raise a fundamental question about how they could be connected to classroom practice. It was apparent that developing an answer to this question would require that ways be found for participants to openly discuss what they were doing in their classrooms with colleagues and the project staff. It would require a way to create and sustain ongoing, collaborative discussions among colleagues about the teaching and learning of American History. Our understanding of this challenge, along with our understanding of the need to integrate historical content, historical thinking, and classroom practice is what led us to implement a program of "Lesson Study" with the teachers in our project.

"Lesson Study": Working to Integrate Historical Content, Historical Thinking, and Classroom Practice

"Lesson Study" is an ongoing method to examine, refine, and improve instruction. This practice is widely used in Japan and is a major component of the professional development of Japanese teachers. Indeed, time is built into the Japanese school day for teachers to collaborate on the development and teaching of "research lessons."⁶ Through "lesson study," teachers—with a focus on student thinking and understanding—plan together, observe each other teaching, and analyze and critique their own lessons. As opposed to a more traditional staff developmental model that is often comprised of a guest speaker providing information that may or may not find its way into teachers' classroom practice, lesson study begins with a focus on the classroom and on student learning. Stigler and Hiebert note the importance of teacher initiative in improving education in their 1999 book, The Teaching Gap: Best ideas from the world's teachers for improving education in the classroom: "Improving something as complex and culturally embedded as teaching requires the efforts of all the players, including students, parents, and politicians. But teachers must be the primary driving force behind change. They are best positioned to understand the problems that students face and to generate possible solutions."⁷

In "lesson study," the development of a lesson requires that teachers draw on their collective knowledge and experience, as well as on expertise from outside the classroom.⁸ They investigate and develop lessons and instructional techniques, then refine and revise these practices through careful observation of their own students. Our decision to implement "lesson study" was, at its core, based on our understanding of the promise it held in helping teachers improve student learning. Additionally, we saw it as a way to meet our goal of increasing collaboration and articulation. Indeed, one of our goals is to investigate how the improvement of student learning and collaboration among teachers are mutually supportive. "Lesson study" builds collaboration as teachers work together to improve what they see as "our" lesson, not "my " lesson.

Our challenge in implementing "lesson study" was to translate its protocols and focus from a Japanese context in which its practices were illustrated by elementary school mathematics, to the 5^th, 8^th, and 11^th grade history classrooms in the Oakland Unified School District. This meant both finding the time for teachers to meet, and finding ways to keep the focus, as lessons were developed, on historical thinking. Although we are not going to address the issue of the requirements it made on teachers' time in-depth here, it is important to note that in our experience, other school commitments often competed with time teachers had set aside for after-school "lesson study" meetings. Some groups had difficulty finding a time when all the members could meet. In this context, the work became more difficult to do, but in this first year of the grant, all groups did manage to get their feet wet in implementing "lesson study" and in researching a specific lesson in 5^th, 8^th, and 11^th grade classrooms.

As we worked with teachers to implement "lesson study" during the first year of the project, we learned a good deal about how to connect it to the context and content of the American History classroom. By the end of the year, after a number of initial drafts and experiences, we had developed and refined our "guide to lesson study." Below is a copy of that guide. Please note its focus on both preparing for the lesson and on learning from it. In addition, note how in the lesson planning process, it asks teachers to focus on student understanding and historical thinking as they plan for how to move students towards the historical understandings they desire. Note also the question that asks teachers to think about and plan for how they might overcome anticipated problems they might face as they present the material to their students.

"Lesson Study"—A Guide for Planning⁹
PART I:
Use this planning guide to help prepare your Lesson Study lesson.

Lesson unit, topic and rationale - How does this lesson connect to the unit you will teach?
What do you want students to understand at the end of the unit? Questions to consider:
- What does it mean to say a student understands a particular historical event, individual, or concept?
- What academic skills, historical thinking skills, and understandings are essential to this lesson?
- What do you want students to know and understand about the selected topic and the history of democracy in America?
What specific information and understandings do you want students to get from this particular lesson? Whatquestion guides the lesson plan?
What document(s) will be used to focus the lesson?
What do students currently understand about this topic?
How will this work help students better understand the struggle for democracy?
What's the lesson's "drama," or sequence of experiences, activities, and questions that will help students achieve the goals you set for this lesson? What is the lesson plan?
How might students respond to the questions and activities in the lesson? What problems and misconceptions might arise? What will be the response?

PART II:
How can we learn from "Lesson Study"?

What evidence, in addition to a reflective piece of writing, should we gather and discuss? How can we learn through both observation and reading of student work?
Create a list of questions you will be trying to answer through observation. What documents, a seating chart for example, can assist the observation?
Create a list of questions you will be answering through a look at student work.
What are the implications for how you develop and teach other lessons?
What instructional questions were raised that you did not anticipate?

Preparing for a Second Round of "Lesson Study"

By the end of the our first year of implementation, all participants in the grant had worked on and implemented one lesson study, with varying degrees of success and frustration. We will discuss some of these successes and frustrations in the next section. During the 2002-2003 school year we will be working with two cohorts of teachers. Our original cohort will do two lesson studies. One, early in the school year, will be on a lesson connected to how they introduce or teach about the struggle for democracy. A second will be done in the spring of 2003. At this time groups will return to the lesson they taught last spring and revise it based on what they have learned. A second group member will then teach the revised lesson in his or her classroom. Our second cohort of teachers, recruited this fall, will work on "lesson study" in the spring of 2003.

To help prepare teachers for this work, we took the topic "Nat Turner's Confession," that Professor Waldo Martin discussed at our summer institute and developed a lesson, responding to questions in the "lesson study guide." As project directors, it was important that we work with the guide in order to better understand what it asked of teachers, but also to model how "lesson study" might support the integration of historical thinking and content. The lesson on Nat Turner is the lesson we developed to achieve these goals (see Appendix). This spring, all of the 8^thgrade teachers in the project will teach this lesson.¹⁰ We will use the student work that is generated by the assignment to look closely at its implementation in practice and to discuss how we might evaluate a student's historical thinking skills. The planning guide and excerpts from this lesson can be found in the Appendix.

Implementing the Project Program in Year II Questions and Plans

A year into our three-year grant finds us both exhilarated and having even more questions than when we started. We want to share some of the concerns and questions that have emerged from our work, using our initial goals as a way to assess where we are now.

Deepening Content Knowledge and Improving Historical Thinking. The historians who have spoken to the teachers have been extremely well received and many teachers share an expanding view of the history of democracy. In interviews with participating teachers our evaluators concluded that working with the historians has "invigorated the spirit of the teachers by making it clear that K-12 teachers share a common goal with university professors: teaching history to young people." However, we've found that we need to do more in terms of addressing the specific content needs of each grade level. For example, 5^thgrade teachers, while fascinated with a discussion of labor and unions in the 19^thand 20^thcenturies, are not, due to the time frames for each grade laid out in the California History-Social Science standards, going to teach that content. And because they were spending time listening to that scholar, they didn't have a lecture on something directly related to the time period they are responsible to teach—Shay's Rebellion, for example. This year we will address this concern by building in time for grade level groups to meet. The teachers in each level will work with one of the doctoral students hired by the project to share information more connected to a particular grade level's content focus.

But we also learned that hearing from historians wasn't the only way teachers at each grade level were enhancing their content knowledge. Addressing questions of content was also part of the "lesson study" process. In some groups the teachers would each take up an aspect of the material to be presented in their lesson and do research beyond their textbooks. Teachers would read new sources and present new information to their colleagues. In this way, "lesson study" also became a vehicle for teachers to expand their knowledge of United States history.

Helping teachers better understand the discipline of history is a more difficult issue to address than enhancing particular content knowledge. A recent study conducted on the impact of professional development provided by local projects of the California History-Social Science Project found that

teachers were not able to articulate the historical process in the abstract.... The study showed us the failure of even the best teachers to understand the complete disciplinary process can have peculiar impacts on what they emphasize in their teaching—and most importantly, on how students understand the discipline. In other words, what teachers understood from our programs, they transmitted and taught—even emphasized. What they failed to understand was lost.¹¹

An example of this from our work was the questions teachers wanted students to consider. They asked such questions as, "What is the role of a citizen?" or "How democratic is the United States today?" While these questions can provoke great class discussion, they are not historical questions. They do not help students understand that history explains change over time. Rather, the questions lead to answers that are fixed in time or static. With this idea in mind, our first session for this school year focused on the topic, "What is a good historical question?"

Our experiences during the 2001-2002 school year, as we have interviewed teachers and analyzed their work with the project, reinforce the challenge identified by the California History-Social Science Project Study. We have learned that we need to address the broad questions of historical thinking more explicitly in the next two years. A yardstick of our success will be the student work produced on the grade level assessments we will implement in the spring of 2003. This student work, in addition to the student work produced through "lesson study," will provide a basis for analyzing connections between content and classroom practice. The success of this strand of our project is also dependent upon our success in helping students attain a greater ability to read and write historical texts.

Reading and Writing. We will address the issue of reading and writing in depth in years two and three of our project. This is not to say, however, that we ignored the issue during year one. In fact, it was addressed in several ways. For example, we had each historian bring in a document to share as part of his or her talk with teachers. This was done to both broaden the use of primary source documents and to raise questions about how to help students understand the content of these documents. "Could students understand the language or ideas in these sources?" "What's the best way to teach vocabulary?" "What reading strategies help students not only gather information, but also promote historical understanding?" "Are there particular reading strategies that promote historical thinking?" The more teachers saw the value in using primary sources, the more need was expressed for setting aside time to explicitly address these and other questions. Issues of literacy were also central as teachers prepared for "lesson study." The act of translating ideas into classroom practice demanded that teachers deal directly with vocabulary development, understanding arguments in text, and being able to express a response in either oral or written form.

Collaboration. As conceived by the program, "lesson study" provided the teachers with a process to investigate formally and collaboratively classroom practice. It encouraged reflection on important questions: "Why do you want to teach this topic in this way?" "Why is it important to you?" "What do you want students to understand?" "How will you develop that understanding?" Collaboration in 'lesson study" provided teachers with an opportunity to be "producers" of knowledge, rather than merely "consumers." In this case, they were working to produce the knowledge required to teach history in an engaging and effective way. Ideally, the innovations in their lessons will derive partly from issues or questions raised by the professional historians. While this was not as evident in the questions developed for lesson study in year one, we will work to make the upcoming speaker series compliment "lesson study" more fully in subsequent years.

However, "lesson study" also put the teachers' expressed desire to collaborate with colleagues to the test. We found that many teachers were frustrated with each other in their attempts to work together. Some showed up late to meetings, or didn't show up at all. Some teachers planned extensively while others in their group didn't contribute an equal share. At the project level, we discussed these issues as we evaluated "lesson study" last spring. We decided that we would spend more time this fall creating ground rules for meetings to help answer the frustration of the teachers. More deeply rooted than these logistical concerns, however, is the streak of individualism that is part of American culture and is intensified by the way teachers work in isolation in our school systems. The idea behind "lesson study" is for a group to plan a lesson and one teacher to teach the group lesson. In practice, we found that while groups met and had a general idea of the lesson, in many cases only the teacher who actually implemented the lesson expressed a need for further lesson development and refinement. Thus a group's debriefing after the lesson often focused on "your" lesson, not "our" lesson. We want to shift the focus from how the teacher taught the lesson to a discussion of the lesson design itself and, most importantly, to a discussion of what the student work says about student learning and the effectiveness of a particular lesson.

Articulation and Assessment. During the first year, the goal was to have grade level groups begin to work together. During the second and third years the goal is to build articulation between the grades. Next year we have ambitious plans for implementing articulation. Part of this connects to the grade level assessments participants will give to their students in spring of 2003. The student work generated in these assessments will be used in several ways. We will examine how students write about history from the 5^ththrough 11^thgrade. Do their understandings become more sophisticated? Are they better able to use evidence to make arguments? Our goal is to create a companion volume to our district content and historical thinking standards. This volume will become our district performance standards and will provide a crucial resource for teachers and the district. Right now we have content standards that ask students to consider multiple perspectives or to look at evidence. What we don't have is any written work from students, evaluated against our historical thinking standards, that demonstrates how well they are meeting the standards. We envision a book with student writing and accompanying teacher commentary that evaluates whether the student have done an adequate job of meeting the standards. In other words, our book should answer the question, "How good is good enough?" in terms of students' abilities, viewed at different grade levels.

Conclusion

The professional development program of Oakland's Teaching Ameri-can History grant, begun during the 2001-2002 school year, is focused on providing teachers the opportunity to increase their knowledge of Ameri-can History as they work to improve their classroom practice. We have discussed how we have tried, through professional development, to answer this question: How can the content and ideas presented by the historians and project staff find their way into teacher lessons, and ultimately, how might this work support student learning and understanding of American History? Although we have discussed many elements of the program, it is essential to keep in mind that each element is but one piece of a larger whole. Success in answering the question above depends upon how well our project and its participating teachers learn to integrate reading, writing, and history coherently as we work to teach students American History and develop historical understanding. We hope that DeTocqueville's ghost will haunt many of our students in years to come as they grapple with America's past and its ongoing struggle to create and sustain a democratic society.

Appendix

"Lesson Study" and Historical Thinking— Excerpts from Planning for a Sample Lesson on Nat Turner PART I: Use this planning guide to help prepare your Lesson Study lesson.

2.	What do you want students to understand at the end of the unit?
	a)	An understanding that slaves, at great risk and cost, resisted slavery.
	b)	An understanding that people, at that time, had different perspectives on the events leading up to the Civil War.
	c)	An understanding that historical interpretation means it is possible to tell different stories and come to different conclusions about the same event.

3.	What specific information and understandings do you want students to get from this particular lesson? What question guides the lesson plan?
	a)	Was Nat Turner's revolt was a success?
	b)	This question asks students to consider multiple perspectives on Nat Turner and his actions. It asks students to answer the question by considering different historical interpretations and developing an historical account that evaluates the significance of the event.

5.	What do students currently understand about this topic?
	•	They may understand that there were slave revolts, but they may not know about Nat Turner. They may understand that there was a war over slavery.

6.	How will this work help students better understand the struggle for democracy?
	•	Learn how specific groups and individuals struggled to obtain their "freedom," or to secure their democratic rights.

8.	How might students respond to the questions and activities in the lesson? What problems and misconceptions might arise? What will be the response?
	•	Students will have problems with comprehending the primary sources. Vocabulary will be a problem.
	•	Students may have trouble placing themselves in that time period in order to understand the actions people took—may lack historical empathy.
	•	Students may have trouble with the ambiguity of the situation. Understanding that an event can be seen as both positive and negative at the same time.

Excerpts from Lesson on Nat Turner
With Connection to Oakland Unified Historical Thinking Standards

U.S. History—The Road to the Civil War

Was Nat Turner's Revolt a Success?

Read the following passage(s) taken from your textbook and explain why Nat Turner rebelled and if his revolt was a success.

"The most violent slave revolt in the United States occurred in 1831. Nat Turner, a slave from Virginia, believed that God had called on him to overthrow slavery. Nat Turner's Rebellion began on an August night in 1831, when Turner led a group of slaves in a plan to kill all the planters' families in their country; they started with the family that held Turner as a slave and had soon killed almost 60 white people in the area.
More than 100 slaves were killed in an attempt to put down the rebellion. A posse caught up with the group, but Turner escaped. However, he was caught within weeks and sentenced to hang. Before the trial, he made a confession in which he expressed his belief that the revolt was justified and worth losing his life. "I am willing to suffer the fate that awaits me." He was executed on November 11, 1831. After his rebellion many slave states strengthened their slave codes to increase control over slaves, as the system continued to spread."

—from The Call of Freedom, p. 443.

Connections to OUSD Historical Thinking Standards

Chronological/Spatial Thinking

•

Students know the key events of the historical eras they are studying, and place them in chronological sequence.

Below are a number of sources that provide more information about Nat Turner's Rebellion. What information does the author provide about the rebellion? Which argument does this information support? Does it support the argument the rebellion was a success or does it support the argument the rebellion was not a success?

Source 1—After his capture and arrest on October 30, 1831, Nat Turner was imprisoned in the Southampton [Virginia] County Jail, where he was interviewed by Thomas R. Gray, a Southern physician. Out of that interview came his "Confession." Below are excerpts from the interview.

—from The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection,
in Southhampton (county), by Thomas R. Gray, VA...Baltimore, 1831
("Africans in America," http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h500t.html)

And my mother and grandmother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying, in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast...

...and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.

Ques.	"Do you not find yourself mistaken now?" [Gray]
Ans.	"Was not Christ crucified?"

     Source 4—Harriet Ann Jacobs, born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, eventually escaped to the North, where she wrote a narrative about her ordeal of slavery. In Chapter Twelve ofIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, Jacobs describes the harassment of blacks in Edenton, North Carolina, following Nat Turner's rebellion.

"Fear of Insurrection"
"NOT far from this time Nat Turner's insurrection broke out; and the news threw our town into great commotion. Strange that they should be alarmed when their slaves were so "contented and happy"! But so it was....
     "By sunrise, people were pouring in from every quarter within twenty miles of the town. I knew the houses were to be searched; and I expected it would be done by country bullies and the poor whites.... Orders were given, and the wild scouts rushed in every direction, wherever a colored face was to be found.
     "...Those who never witnessed such scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was not the slightest ground for suspicion. Colored people and slaves who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial manner...."

Connections to OUSD Historical Thinking Standard
Working With Evidence and Multiple Perspectives

Evidence

•

Students understand the meaning of vocabulary used in written sources and accurately read information from them

•

Students identify the main idea or ideas in the source as well as supporting details.

•

Students understand the primary sources can tell us about the person or people who created them...He or she identifies vocabulary in printed documents that reveal the author's perspectives.

Multiple Perspectives

•

Students understand the importance of considering the actions and perspectives of all those involved in a particular event. They discuss how a person's circumstances were connected to how they viewed the world. They understand how actions of different people are connected to their values, beliefs, and circumstances.

PART 3—Below are four historians writing about what happened after Nat Turner's revolt. Provide a one-sentence summary of each historian's argument. For each historian complete the following sentence.
"This historian argues the rebellion was a [choose 'success' or 'failure'] __________ because it caused_______________."

	I.	...When asked whether he regretted what he had done, Turner replied, "Was not Christ crucified?" "If slave rebellions were not nearly so common as individual day-to-day acts of resistance to slavery, they did keep alive the hope of freedom and expressed in the most dramatic form the discontent that lay just beneath the apparently placid surface of southern slavery."
—from The Reader's Companion to American History, Eric Foner, p. 996–997.

	II.	"Whites were not slow to see the connection between Turner's relative freedom of motion as an educated preacher and his leadership in the uprising. In the wake of Turner's Rebellion, southern courts and legislatures clapped stricter controls on the freedoms granted to slaves and to free blacks. In most areas, free blacks were denied the right to own guns, buy liquor, hold public assemblies, testify in court, and vote. Slaves were forbidden to own any private property, to attend unsupervised worship services, and to learn reading and writing...."
—from Making America, Carol Berkin et al., 1999, p 341–342.

*Connections to OUSD Historical Thinking Standards* Historical Interpretation and Significance
	Interpretation
	•	Students understand it is possible to tell different stories about the same events.
	•	Students identify differences in two or more historical accounts.

PART 4—Using the information gathered from the source documents and the historians, add details and information to what you wrote in response to the textbook passage (part 1). Persuade the reader that Nat Turner's Revolt was either a success or failure.
*Connections to OUSD Historical Thinking Standards* Interpretation and Significance
	Interpretation
	•	Students use several sources to construct a narrative of a historical account.

	Significance
	•	Students explain how events and decisions had consequences for others. They evaluate the consequences as positive or negative (or a combination of the two).

Notes

^1. All Oakland Unified statistics cited in this article are based on school year 2000-2001 data.

^2. The Oakland Unified Historical Thinking Standards are available on our project website—www.teachingamericanhistory.us

^3. Our collaborations with the University of California, Berkeley, Department of History and the University of California, California Heritage Project provide the opportunity to draw upon the expertise of many nationally recognized historians and scholars, as well as university librarians.

^4. California History-Social Science Content Standards for grades 5, 8, and 11 are available at www.cde.ca.gov/standards

^5. See the resources section of our website www.teachingamericanhistory.us for examples of documents historians either worked with or suggested.

^6. For a more detailed description and discussion of Lesson Study see James Stigler and James Hiebert, The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom (New York: Free Press, 1999), or Catherine Lewis, "Lesson Study: A Handbook of Teacher-Led Instructional Change," Research for Better Schools, 2002 (www.rbs.org). Or visit the Lesson Study section of our project website.

^7. Stigler and Hiebert, The Teaching Gap.

^8. To assist with the work of each of the project's lesson study groups we hired three University of California doctoral students. Each of the students helped the groups identify key issues, documents, and questions connected to the topic of the lesson they were developing. Project staff also facilitated the work of each lesson study group meeting.

^9. Developed by Teaching American History Grant, Oakland Unified School District, Oakland, CA and Catherine Lewis, Mills College, Oakland, CA.

^10. Complete copies of Nat Turner Lesson and Lesson Study Guide are available on the project website.

^11. Kathleen Medina, et al., "How Do Students Understand the Discipline of History as an Outcome of Teachers' Professional Development." Regents of the University of California, 2000, p. 19.

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